


Red

by Demonfeathers



Category: Rotkäppchen | Little Red Riding Hood (Fairy Tale)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Little Red Riding Hood, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-04
Updated: 2014-06-04
Packaged: 2018-02-03 08:55:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1738751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Demonfeathers/pseuds/Demonfeathers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(there is a path of needles and a path of pins, and both will make you bleed before you are done- but whatever you do, do not leave the path)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red

She kicks her mother black and blue for months before her due date, her soon-to-be-grandmother clicking her tongue and rubbing salves on her daughter’s stomach. “You watch this one. She’s going to be trouble, you can tell already,” she says, surveying her work with a critical eye. Her mother only sighs tiredly. “She’s trouble already,” she says.

When she finally comes, she’s born breach, kicking herself free of the film that coats her and screaming herself red. Her new grandmother wipes her off and tuts. “Watch her good,” she says. “Born breach, always kicking. You watch those feet of hers, or they’ll carry her right away from you.” Her mother sighs again. “Maybe they’ll carry her right back again, too,” she says quietly, exhausted from her efforts. The grandmother’s response is a derisive snort. “Bloody likely, I’m sure,” she says. “Here, hold on to her while you can.”

 

When she’s thirteen, Jimmy McDouglas pins her to the wall of the gym and kisses her in front of half the class. She squirms and struggles, but he has his hands wrapped tight around her upper arms to hold her in place and she can’t break free. When he finally lets her go she flees out the doors and down the hall to hide in the bathroom for the next two class periods, her feet flying around the corners as Jimmy’s piercing wolf whistle that had followed her out the gym doors rings in her head. It’s around the school by the end of the day that Jimmy kissed her and she ran away like a frightened rabbit. The teachers scold Jimmy, but they smile to themselves when they think the children can’t see and whisper among themselves, how cute, he has a crush, isn’t he sweet on her? Her classmates tease her for weeks, taunts of “Scared of the big bad wolf, are you? Aw, poor little red riding hood, did the big bad wolf try to kiss you? Awoooooo!” haunting her on the playground and in the line at lunch. It sticks, and they call her Little Red for the rest of the year, and in the years after. After a while, she stops cringing, and starts to bristle.

 

            When she’s fifteen, she walks alone down the city streets and alleyways to her grandmother’s apartment after school, blood dripping from her split lip down her chin. When she comes through the door, her grandmother looks up from her place on the couch with her sewing, needles flashing silver with thread trailing red in their wake, like the line of blood down her face. Her grandmother regards her with hooded eyes for a moment before tutting and jerking her head towards the bathroom. She shuffles past into the small room, stopping to stare at her reflection in the mirror above the sink: dark skin and dark eyes looking bruised, thick black hair wrangled back into a ponytail with colorful plastic bands, curls coming loose and frizzing up. In the forefront of it all, swollen lips covered in clotting blood, looking ragged and rusted.

            Out in the living room, her grandmother’s scissors click.

            She wets two fingers under the tap, carefully wiping her chin clean of blood, staring critically at herself as the dried flakes swirl brown and pink down the drain. She leaves her lips alone, fresh red welling up when she move them, splitting and cracking. She ignores it, turning instead to the cupboard where her grandmother keeps all her bathroom supplies along with her makeup bag. It is the latter she pulls out, rummaging through until she finds her grandmother’s lipstick. Turning back to the mirror, she uncaps it and carefully screws the container to bring the bright red coloring further out of the tube. Holding it up, she slowly spreads it across her lips, holding back a wince as it gets into the split lip, pulling at the edges of the wound and smearing blood across her lips as well, red mixing with red and turning her mouth into something savage. When she’s done, she carefully caps it again and puts it away. She straightens her spine and meets her own eyes in the mirror, fresh blood dripping down her chin from a mouth that reminds her of the pictures she’d seen of predators after a hunt, muzzles matted red with success.

            “Bitch,” she says, her classmate’s words ringing in her ears.

            Well, if it’s a dog they want, she’ll give them a wolf.

 

She’s eighteen and wears red lipstick and fingernail polish and leather, bright against dark skin, drawing attention to what she wants. It draws to her mouth and the flash of white teeth, to the sharpness of her nails, filed and long, and the heavy buckles of her boots, giving every step weight. She’s grown now, matured with a new name gifted to her by the ones that used to force them on her (but she took this one, made it her own, and so when they say _Red_ it is a gift because she says it is), and under the polite façade she’s never lost the fierceness she learned to smear across her lips in front of her grandmother’s bathroom mirror. She tucked it down, buried under close-mouthed smiles and soft words, surrounded herself with people who smile easily and laugh freely to let their carefreeness wash over her and cover her like a winter coat, but she’s never lost it. She’s never pushed down and tamed the ruthlessness of all children, the viciousness they use to survive long enough not to need it anymore. She’s always needed it, and so she keeps it, a heart of fur and fangs in her breast, and she laughs every time the call her Red because oh baby, you’ve got _no_ idea.

 

When she’s twenty, she gets a dog.

She commutes to college in the center of the city, and often comes home late in the evenings on the subway by herself. Too many times the man sitting across from her has caught her eye, smirked, spread his legs wider and slouched lower in his seat, tracking her movements with hooded eyes and a lazy smile. She explains to her professors, and gets permission to sit with her newest acquisition in the back of the room on the condition that the first time it distracts class, the deal is off.

            “I can take care of myself,” she assures her mother. “Some people just need a little visual encouragement up front, that’s all. Easier that way. You know how it is.”

            She decides on a German Shepard mix. It’s cheaper getting a mutt, even the puppies, and she finds a kennel a few miles away and swings by one afternoon after picking up her paycheck from her part-time job. She picks out a puppy with warm brown eyes and too-big paws, black fur down its back and a cream belly. “You’ll do,” she tells it, and it wags its tail and falls over on the toe of one her heeled boots. She smiles, and it’s a wide warm thing, something that’s usually reserved for her mother and her grandmother these days. She trains the dog herself, pours countless hours into pampering it and disciplining it, until by the time it’s started to grow into its paws all it takes is a click of her tongue for it to jump to her command. She names it Fenrir, because it makes her mother roll her eyes in exasperation and her grandmother cluck her tongue at her without looking up from her sewing. Fen, as he becomes known, follows at her heels everywhere she goes, and becomes an irreplaceable fixture in Red’s life very quickly. To her own interest, Red finds she doesn’t mind. For all his fearsomeness when roused, Fen has a way of getting on people’s good sides.

           

            She’s twenty-five and walking down the city streets with Fen striding at her side. Red leather heels strike the cement in counterpoint to claws click-click-clicking in rapid staccato, black fur and black hair gleaming in the morning light together as the city starts to shake itself awake around them. Red pauses to step into a café, Fen waiting patiently on the sidewalk until she returns with a Styrofoam cup of steaming coffee and a couple of pastries, weaving her way to one of the tables set up outside the shop to sit and share her breakfast with him. It’s here, as she sips at her too hot drink and breaks off pieces of croissant for Fen, that she meets him for the first time.

Two tables over sits a man in a canvas jacket with dirty blond hair, a cup of coffee on the table in front of him and the gleam of a metal chain poking out of the neck of his shirt catching the morning sun. He’s glancing idly over a newspaper spread out in front of him, disinterest in the set of his mouth and the slope of his shoulders. She watches him as she eats, seeing the way he shifts his weight and keeps his feet planted firmly beneath him even as he lounges back in his metal chair, lazy confidence in every line of him. The muscles in his arms where his sleeves are rolled up are visible from here, and when he shifts the chain around his next shifts with him and his dog tags swing free. Interesting, she thinks.

She leans down to Fen, feeding him another piece of pastry and ruffling his fur as she leans into his ear and whispers a command to him. Fen wags his tail, jumping up to wander off among the tables, nose to the ground and tail whipping idly. He brushes past the man in the jacket, tail beating hard against the man’s leg as he shoulders his way between him and the table beside him. The man startles, almost spilling his coffee as Fen knocks him off balance. She whistles for Fen’s attention, drawing the man’s in the process, making eye contact briefly before looking down at the German Shepard weaving his way back through the tables to her. She pretends to admonish him, slipping him another bite of pastry as the man climbs to his feet and starts to make his way over. She tilts her head up to see him from where she’s still leaning over Fen (keep your throat covered- make them think you need to) and smiles bashfully at him.

“Sorry about that. He gets a little excited about new smells sometimes,” she says, still leaning over to rub Fen’s head.

He visibly softens his demeanor in the face of a beautiful woman with an apology ready without prompting. “It’s alright. He just startled me a bit. Gorgeous dog. It is a ‘he’, right?”

“Yeah. His name’s Fenrir, Fen for short. He’s been with me for a few years now. Trained him myself.” She lets herself straighten up, but not too much, keep your spine lax and your smile easy.

He smiles back at her, shoulders loosening and smile coming more naturally. “Nice. I’m Lucas, by the way. Lucas Cain.” He holds out a hand to shake.

She laughs, easy and real, and shakes his hand. “Call me Red,” she says, and smiles to herself for the rest of the day.

 

She continues to meet Lucas at the café in the mornings, days turning into weeks turning into months. Two months in, he asks her out to dinner and she accepts. Her friends from college titter and prod her for details. “A military man,” some of them say, “that must be interesting. What’s he like, when it’s just the two of you? Is he sweet, is he demanding?” She smiles and answers, yes to this and no to that, giving enough to satisfy but never so much as they want. Others tut, and try to warn her. “That boy’s a wolf,” they say, to her private amusement. “Surely you know the type, Red. Be careful around him. Guys like that are all smiles when they want something, but watch out if you don’t have it.” To these ones she smiles softly, gently reassuring. “It’s alright,” she says. “I know what I’m doing.”

            She takes him home to meet her mother and grandmother. Her mother smiles and welcomes him in, chats with him as she makes lunch for them all, asks pointed questions and expected ones, sharp and yielding in all the right places until his intentions toward her daughter come tumbling out without giving him time to shape them into what he thinks she wants to hear. He winces at his own stumbling answers, but her mother simply nods, somewhat resigned. He’s no monster, of course, she knows Red would never have let anyone like that in her house, but he’s very much what he’s expected to be. Very… typical. Her grandmother watches silently, catching Red’s eye and holding it until Red nods, mouths _‘I know, don’t worry’_ , and smiles with her grandmother’s preferred shade of red lipstick coating her mouth.

            That night as they lay in bed, after Lucas has fallen asleep, she picks up his dog tags from where they lay tangled in his shirt on the floor and with one long nail scratches _‘RED’_ into their backs. It’s faint, so shallow and faded that you’d never see it if you weren’t looking, didn’t turn it to the light the right way. But it’s there, nonetheless, and she smiles to herself and scratches Fen behind the ear as she makes her way back to bed, the tags on his own collar clinking softly. She lies down between them, one whose hands fit around a gun the way in another life they might have fit around an axe, and the other who would only need to make one half-hearted lunge to rip the leash from her hands and turn against her as his kind were bred to do. She goes to sleep; she has nothing to fear from them, after all.

 

            She stands beside him in conversations, at the café, at clubs, in line at the restaurants he takes her to on dates, and smiles softly without teeth and ignores the arm around her waist, sees how other men catch sight of it and turn away where they might have pressed closer. She walks Fen through the park on a heavy leash, all rippling muscle and tongue lolling over white teeth, seeing through tilted shades how people take second glances and nervously make room for them on the sidewalk. She stalks down city streets with a bottle of pepper spray in her pocket and enough rings on her fingers that she might as well be wearing bladed brass knuckles. She paints her nails red as an excuse to keep them long and sharp, spends time in the shower shaving so the world won’t see that she has fur, and wears dark sunglasses so it’s not obvious how her eyes track everything around her. She smiles with covered teeth, and learns from the tales her grandmother once taught her with pins between her lips and a needle in her hand, so that when history repeats itself as it always does, she knows how to straddle the line between acceptable and not so that she comes out the other side intact. She stalks through life with a mouth colored like success, and feet that have never stopped moving, calculated steps on unsteady ground.

 

The moral of the story is this: There are wolves, and there are woodsmen, and the difference between them is not in the number of legs they walk on but the number of honeyed comments they’ll give before they strike. The wolf will fill his belly with you, but the woodsmen will fill your belly with more than rocks and leave you to stumble and drown in a river of responsibilities that should never have been yours.

The moral of the story is this: There are wolves, and there are girls, and to escape the woodsman you must be more than both. You must be a girl, sweet eyed and innocent and oh so caring (Where are you going, my dear? Why, to care for my sick grandmother of course), or they’ll call foul (there is so little difference between _witch_ and _bitch_ ), and start swinging their axes. But the girl cannot fight, cannot howl her protestations to the moon, and instead must swallow them demurely and smile without teeth when the woodsman comes by. You must be a wolf, all claws and fangs and bristling fur, drawing blood from those who would hang your pelt on their smokehouse wall and tally you up as another victory to be won, or they will sew their rocks into your stomach and drown your dreams like a litter of pups. But the wolf cannot hide, cannot help but present its nature to the world for the woodsman to track, and so must skulk on the fringes where others dare not go (there is a path of needles and a path of pins, and both will make you bleed before you are done- but whatever you do, _do not leave the path_ ).

The moral of the story is this: There are wolves, and there are girls, and to escape the woodsman you must take the traits of the first and hide them behind the traits of the other. You must be sweet eyed and innocent, and smile without teeth so that they will not see that yours are fangs, and wear clean white gloves so that they will not see your fingers are tipped with claws. You must be a wolf _and_ a girl, because the woodsman never sees both in the same place and so he cannot see you. After all, he never understood that girls are more vicious creatures, and wolves more gentle, than he has portrayed them as.


End file.
